“That sounded pointed.”
She shrugged.
“Listen, I don’t beat around the bush. This feels like you just don’t have a clue and are floundering around in it like we were. No offense, but how is the FBI going to figure this out, when they don’t know anything yet?”
Ethan was to the point.
“I’ve had this for exactly nine hours, eight of them asleep. I come here, and your ME runs, even though talking to him helps us get a feel for the killer. Now, I don’t have anything in this file that he might not have thought to put in here. Like, were they restrained?”
Dannie played it cooler, trying to calm this down.
“Well, they didn’t have skin, so how would he know?” he asked.
Oh, well, they knew.
“Hematomas,” they both said at the same time.
Gene was a bit more specific.
“You know, like bruising. This report is pretty scant with details. It seems like you want us to fail. Like you hate the FBI so much, you and your ME don’t want us to solve it.”
The two cops looked insulted.
Well, turnabout was fair play.
Right?
“That isn’t what we want,” Dannie offered. “Maybe we’re all tired and uptight about this. Maybe we can calm it down and try to start it up again.”
Yeah, only, you didn’t get a second chance to make a first impression on the Feds running this shitshow. When someone showed you who they were, you had to believe them, and they were getting the distinct impression that there was some bullshit going on.
No one agreed to restart, but Ethan was more than happy to get this show on the road.
Without them.
“Thank you for the report. We’re going to start working on this now,” Ethan said, signaling they were done talking. He wasn’t playing games with two detectives.
First, he didn’t have to.
Secondly, he gave the respect he was given, and since they arrived on the scene last night, there had been very little respect and a whole lot of wanting in on this case.
“Seriously?” Leah asked. “Why do I think that‘we’re’doesn’t involve us?”
Ethan was to the point.
“We have jurisdiction. The second the bodies turned up on Native land, the chief of police asked the FBI for help. That gives us the lead on this, and we’re going to take it. We called you to see if you had victims. You didn’t call us to see if we could help.”
Oh, Leah didn’t like that at all.
So, she fought him.
“You don’t know they were killed there!” she insisted. “You’re guessing.”
Ethan was aware.
“And unfortunately for you, you don’t know if they weren’t, or if the person behind this is Native. That puts us in the same position, but with who the Chief of Police called. Us. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re going to check in with your boss, and move on.”
Both detectives were dumbfounded and stunned that they were being excluded.
